A Feast for the Eyes! Hamish Bowles Takes a Tour of India’s Crown Jewels in Paris

Finding myself in Paris for an afternoon this week, I sped to the opening of “From the Great Mughals to the Maharajas: Jewels from the Al Thani Collection” at the Grand Palais. The breathtaking exhibition (through June 5) contains pieces assembled over a remarkably short time by Qatar’s Sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah Al-Thani—and curated by Amin Jaffer—which span the glory years of the maharajas, from a baroque pearl pendant of c. 1575–1625 and Shah Jahan’s engraved spinel of 1643–4 (later mounted as a ring) to the fabled Art Deco period, the last gasp of the ruling class before Independence finally stripped them of their power and much of their wealth.

Also included are the Sheikh’s contemporary commissions in the Indian taste by Cartier, the Mumbai-based Bhagat, and the endlessly inventive Joel Rosenthal of JAR (whose jewels include a naturalistically modeled elephant-head brooch with a panache of diamonds like a turban’s aigrette and an 18th-century pale jade hilt carved as a camel’s head, which has been mounted like the stamen of a pavé diamond arum lily).

I had seen some highlights of the collection in a small exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the winter of 2014, but the scope of this show is significantly amplified (with loans from the Hermitage, the British Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, among others) and displayed with great imagination and style in this soaring-ceilinged space as a series of areas defined by snowfalls of golden petals, translucent curtain walls of metallic cloth, or display columns that burst open like overripe pomegranates to reveal a single breathtaking jewel or fabled stone. One walks in free form through these islands of wonders, admiring by turns jade-handled 17th- and 18th-century objects and weaponry in one area, masterpieces of the goldsmith’s and enameler’s arts in another, and Jazz Age masterpieces and portraits elsewhere.

Many of these splendid jewels were commissioned and worn by men, who delighted in finding new ways to wear them (along with the magnificent necklaces, often worn layered one atop the other, there are chokers, turban pins, rings, and armbands) or use them (the handle of a fly whisk, a bedazzled armrest, a chess set).

Provenance in jewels is everything, and here there are leopard-head finials from Tipu Sultan’s throne, the Nawab of Arcot’s diamond, the pearl canopy commissioned by the Maharaja of Baroda in the 1860s and intended for the Prophet’s tomb at Medina (but never completed), as well as pieces made for the infinitely stylish Maharajah of Indore, HH Yeshwant Rao Holkar II. The Maharaja commissioned Man Ray to take his playfully experimental wedding pictures, and in 1930 hired the architect Eckart Muthesius to build a state-of-the-art modernist palace—the first air-conditioned building in India, subsequently filled with iconic furnishings by Marcel Breuer, Eileen Gray, Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, and Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, among others—in the center of Indore, which was drearily repurposed as municipal offices.. In 1929, the fashionable French portraitist Bernard Boutet de Monvel depicted the Maharaja’s rangy elegance when dressed in conventional white tie, and in 1934 produced a pendant portrait of him in traditional white cotton Indian dress sitting cross-legged on a white cushion and wearing a necklace featuring two extraordinary pear-shaped drop diamonds (mounted by Chaumet in 1913). These two portraits—treasures of Jazz Age taste and two of my personal favorite portraits of any time and place—are now in the Al Thani collection, as are some of the Maharaja’s jewels, which are as elegant and imaginative as he was and include a 1930s ruby ring set in an asymmetric diamond mount by Mauboussin (and later adapted by Harry Winston) that recalls the sideways sweep of the traditional red turban that he also wears in the 1934 Boutet de Monvel portrait.

The almost unimaginable opulence of imperial Indian taste, though, is perhaps best exemplified by the necklace that Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala commissioned from Cartier in 1928. The august firm remounted some of the maharaja’s stones in a necklace that defies description, but when I tell you that it was anchored by a 234.65-carat yellow diamond, you might start to get the picture.

The jewels were picked out over the years, but the framework was rediscovered in 1998, and Cartier have since recreated its original splendor, using a mix of precious, semi-precious, and synthetic stones to suggest its staggering former magnificence.

Although somewhat outshone by their husbands, there are some evocative treasures of the occasional maharani here too. These include the orchidaceous Maharani Indira Devi of Cooch Behar, painted daringly barefoot in a sequined chiffon sari and her signature pearls by the French portraitist Alfred Jonniaux in 1932. The Maharani was the mother of Gayatri Devi, who married the glamorous playboy Maharajah of Jaipur, embarked on a political career, and befriended Jacqueline Kennedy, with whom she was said to go on covert adventures to Little India in Queens. Having been enthralled by the Maharani’s 1976 autobiography A Princess Remembers, I was starstruck when I met her in London at the house of Ashley and Allegra Hicks a decade or two ago, her bobbed hair a snowy white and set off with crimson pink lipstick and a brilliant emerald sari with jewels to match. Unforgettable.